We are family!

We are constantly learning new things each day in our class and even though we are winding down and completing some things, we are also starting new things. Today we did an activity which was a little like magic. We used wax crayons and drew pictures on a large white piece of paper. When we had completed our drawing, we painted over the wax crayon and were amazed that we could still see our drawings. The wax paper did not hide our drawings but rather, it enhanced them and made them look brighter and more interesting. The special paint is called dye and it is vegetable based; the colours are really strong and when we paint, we will add a little to the colours as well. Shelley showed us how you can draw with a white crayon, which of course, you cannot really see, and then when you paint over it, with dye, it “comes alive”. She wrote some of our names in this way. We were so happy to have our entire class with us today. Yesterday we had six children and today we doubled that and had 12 children and three teachers. We welcomed Sofie back from her holiday in Los Angeles. She had so many activities to do so that she wouldn’t miss out on some of the wonderful things that we did during the past two weeks.

We sat together on the floor and all of us had a chance to tell our teachers and friends, how many people we have in each of our families. Some of us had the same number of people in our families; Shelley had the least amount (here in Japan) and Aaila has the most; Shelley had two people in her family and Aaila has seven. Daiki, Akari, Dominik, Lisa, Liezel and Lina have four people in their families. Hana, Chloe, Shreyas and Sofie have three people in their families. Alexa, Taiyo and Hisami have five people in their families. We said that Petals Class is our Ohana International School family and Hisami, Liezel and Shelley are our mommies. Shelley asked if we had a daddy in our class but we didn’t think anyone was the daddy for us, in our class. We

sang “I want you to meet my family” and we laughed because we had a hippo (kaba), dog (inu), cat (nekko), giraffe (kirin), monkey (saru) and duck (ahiru) as members of our family. Maybe if we lived on a farm, we could have some of these animals as our farm family but we are not sure about a giraffe and a hippo!

We sat together and lit three candles because today is the third night of Channukah. We sang “How many candles do we light?” and then we sang “Spin little dreidel, spin little dreidel”. We never realized that we have a whole lot of spinning tops in our classroom and when Shelley showed them to us, we were amazed. Some were wooden and some were plastic and one was even made of rubber; some had things painted on them and there was one that looked just like a ladybug. What we realized was, that when you spin a spinning top, the designs on it change completely. The lines become blurs of colour and some of the patterns just disappear.

We changed our calendar and said that today was not sunny like yesterday but it was cloudy. Then we read “A Snowy Day” which is a beautiful story about a little boy who goes outside and does wonderful things in the snow. The one thing that he did was put a snowball in his pocket, but when he came home, the snowball had gone. We were not sure where it had gone and then Sofie told us that it was water!

We hope that when we come to school in January we can do some experiments with snow and see what happens.

Wishing you all a great evening and stay warm! See you tomorrow!

Love always the children in Petals Class.